2008 – troop meetings

SATURDAY, 29 NOVEMBER 2008

Winter Term 2008

After Half Term, things went back to “normal”. The Friday of Half Term was spent drying out tents and putting stuff away from the camping trip. The next few weeks we were involved in getting our First Aid badge and several other activities besides, such as a birdsong quiz…

We were played recordings of twenty eight different birdsongs and asked to name the bird which made the noise. Each name was given a description of the noise and, as with the crisp tasting, they weren’t all real birds, the two made up ones were the Oomigoolie bird and the Red Herring Gull! 

Each week we play at least two games, one at the start and one at the end. I will take this opportunity to tell you some more of our games; Rupture Cone, so called because the aim of the game is to avoid touching the cone and sometimes the only way is by jumping over; if misjudged this can end in a rupture! 

Then there’s jump rope; this is self explanatory, but not as you’d expect: Skip swings a piece of rope around at ankle level and we all have to jump over it, the person who falls over each time is out; the winner is the person who stays in the longest. 

Another game, one which we’ve only played once, remains nameless but it’s like tug of war mixed with chalk rugby. The aim of the game is to get your end of the rope to touch the wall of the Scout hut. Unfortunately, the other team are trying to do the same with the other end and the rope is shorter than the Scout hut is long!

Chalk Rugby, my absolute favourite, is very similar; get the piece of chalk and put a cross in your goal. And try to stop the other team doing it first by any means, including: sitting on them, grabbing their arms, wrestling the chalk off them, stamping on the chalk, swallowing it and (of course) rugby tackling!

As you can see, it’s not exactly chess and backgammon!